Charlie nodded. “I mean, he was laying out money for all this material, the flooring . . .”
“How could you . . .” she started, her voice shaking. But what could she say? She hadn’t read the form either. She never looked at forms, there were so many.
“Dara,” Charlie started, but he didn’t finish.
* * *
*
Dara was on the phone for hours with the insurance company, an endless touch-tone maze, one chirpy voice after another, all assuring her they could change the payee, they could give her a record of payments made, but it would take time and would delay further payments, possibly incur new charges . . .
“I don’t care,” she said. “We’re long past caring about that.”
* * *
*
A trap had been set. They were in it. Dara was sure of it now.
Charlie didn’t say anything, taking a stack of new bills and piercing them on the spike of the bill holder.
“It’s escalating, don’t you see?” Dara said to Charlie, stiff-backed behind his desk, heating pad steaming while he snuck a smoke, the cigarette perched on an open drawer.
Couldn’t he see?
Looking at her, she saw, finally, he could.
THE FIRE EATER AND THE SWORD SWALLOWER
That night, Dara sat in the bathtub a long time, running her fingers along its chipped rim, the dent when their mother slipped that one time, after too much wine.
This was all she had left, their home. Her home.
It was big and old, but all that bigness and age mattered. It was their whole world, their whole history. The Durant history.
The contractor had taken over the studio, an invasion and a deconstruction. He had taken over Marie, an invasion and a deconstruction.
But this. He couldn’t touch this. He never would.
It was where everything had begun, everything. For the first few years of the Durant School of Dance, their mother even taught classes in the house, in its sprawling damp basement, its floors laid with special vinyl.
Upstairs, Dara and Marie shared a bedroom so the two other bedrooms could be combined into yet another studio space, their father knocking down the wall with his claw hammer. Drinking Narragansett all day, crunching cans under his work boots, he kept going, swinging and swinging until there was nothing left, finally catching the claw on his cheek.
Marie found them in the bathroom, blood on the sink, the towels, the bath mat, their mother sewing up her father’s face. (The skin was like crinkly brown paper, she told Dara after.)
After, they disappeared into the bedroom, their mother’s turntable stuttering chansons, Dara and Marie huddled on Dara’s bunk, trying to listen through the wall, but there were too many walls and they couldn’t hear anything except once their mother’s laughter, like a bell, and then crying after, for hours. Crying after their father had stomped back downstairs and disappeared into the dark of the front lawn. Dara and Marie watched him from the window, the streetlamp like a spotlight, the neon flare of a cigarette, his face in his hands.
* * *
*
The house stirred with past moments like these, good and bad, dark and fulsome.
The house was a living, breathing, saggy, and gasping thing.
They would never sell it. They would never leave it. And Marie should not have taken the money. Marie should not have left.
* * *
*
Late into the night, Dara woke to find Charlie had slipped from bed.
It turned out he couldn’t sleep and had spent the night downstairs, on the pullout sofa that was ruinous for his back, the pullout sofa he slept on when he first came to live with them, all those years ago.
In the morning, she saw the tumbler stained with wine on the kitchen table.
“I don’t understand,” he said when she walked past him on her way to the car. “What’s happening to us?”
Dara stopped and put her hand on his shoulder.
“We were all so happy here,” he said, voice foggy and lost.
* * *
*
The studio felt heavy with worry.
The first full dress rehearsal at the Ballenger was only days away, so Saturday brought no rest, no birthday parties, no family activities, no playdates. Instead, the studio was open and everyone was expected, even the Grayson sisters, whose baby brother was being baptized four blocks away.
It was Saturday and they had nothing inconvenient like school to get in the way.
They could work all day until they all burned from it.
“Is that really necessary?” Marie asked after Dara announced that they should expect to be here all day, no complaints, no excuses.
Dara didn’t say anything, pushing past her sister. If Marie wanted to spend the day lolling around in filthy sheets with the contractor, that wasn’t her problem.
The girls were fidgety, nervous. Several lost their footing, one fell. One of the twelve-year-olds accused another of kicking the backs of her legs and the two began shouting, one of them slapping the other in the face with such high drama that one of Marie’s six-year-olds watching from the doorway began to cry.
“Pas de larmes. Dry your eyes,” Dara said, snapping her fingers. It was the only way with the little ones. “Regal. Untouchable.”
The six-year-old clung to Marie’s legs and cried more, her face pink and unbearable. “I hate it,” she whispered, hysterical. “I hate it.”
“Don’t worry,” Marie said, hand cupping the girl’s russet head, “it’ll all be over soon.”
* * *
*
Dara tried to stay in her own studio, away from Marie. It would be bad enough that evening, when they had to go to the Ballenger to work with the stage manager on all the cues. It would take hours.
And Marie was now avoiding Dara too. There were no stealth smokes on the fire escape, or anything that might mean she had to pass through Dara’s studio.
Late in the day, Dara ducked her head in Studio A, but Marie wouldn’t look up from the Polichinelles, the four-and five-year-olds playing the cartwheeling clowns that emerge from Mother Ginger’s enormous hoop skirt in Act II.
They bounded past her and Marie swiveled and turned and only once gave a glance Dara’s way. That face, foxlike. Sly.
* * *
*
And then there was the problem of Bailey Bloom. Every time Dara looked at her, she thought of the girl’s mother. Mrs. Bloom, the choke of her voice. The fear in it.
Mrs. Bloom was entirely missing her daughter’s drama. The curse of Clara upon her, Bailey had arrived that morning in a Shamrock cab, her tights grimy from the seat. It seemed she was no longer welcome in the carpool by her peers, though Gracie Hent claimed there was simply no room in her mother’s hatchback for another girl.
“Plus,” Dara heard Gracie say under her breath, “she sheds.”
Dara walked over, hands on her hips.
“What was that?”
“She sheds,” Gracie repeated, more hesitantly now, her head dipping.
The true terrorism of girls is the accuracy of their aim. Bailey’s hair had become so thin and spare it slipped forever from her meager bun. The day before Dara had found her in the changing room staring at her paddle brush, tufted with a mound of stray hair.
“Mademoiselle Hent,” Dara said sternly, “move to the back row. You’re no longer needed up front.”
Gracie Hent’s look of surprise was gratifying, even as Bailey looked stricken, even as Dara knew it would get worse before it got better.
* * *
*
Back in the office, the phone was ringing and Dara answered it without thinking.
“Ms. Durant?”
“Yes,” Dara said, her chest tightening, the woman’s official tone, something.
“This is Maggie at the county recorder’s office returning your call.”
“Right,” Dara said, alert now. “Are you the one that called the other day? Something about the house?”
“This is Ms. Durant of 1221 Sycamore Avenue, correct?”
“Yes,” Dara said.
“I suppose we’ve been playing phone tag. You’d called about the deed to your property? And you are correct. Your name is still on the deed, along with a Ms. Dara Durant. So if you’d like to record a transfer of ownership, all you need to do is file a quit claim deed.”